Ancient sages
understood and accepted the cosmic principle. The universe is a living,
evolving system, and in
it every part has its place and sub serves the whole.
Subject and object, form and matter, the ideal and the real are one, together
and inseparable; the one is the many, and the many are one.
Reality is an
organic whole of interrelated parts. The same unity in plurality, or identity
in diversity, which characterized nature, we find in mental life, in the act of
knowledge, the knower and the thing known are one. Dialectical thought
expresses the innermost essence of the universal mind; in such thinking the
universal mind knows itself as it is. Reason is the same everywhere the divine
reason is at work; the universe, in so far as it is real and eternal, is the
expression of the thought of God. This thought process culminates into the
science of Logic; which is built over a period of time. The
philosophy of mind
shows how reason after subjugating objective nature, returns to itself and
thereby achieves self consciousness.
Like the good
old Charvaka of post Vedic period western philosophy produced Friedrich
Nietzsche in mid-19th Century. He was the professor of classical
philosophy in Switzerland and later a medical orderly during
Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He spent 10 years in loneliness 1879-1889. But
early in 1889, he had suffered a complete mental breakdown, and he remained
insane until his death in 1900. Schopenhauer had spoken eloquently of Greek
Tragedy. But Nietzsche differed with Schopenhauer (once his Guru), and
maintained that the Greeks, did not respond with the Buddhist negation of the
will rather, they had recourse to art, and in their tragedies they celebrated
life as at bottom, "in spite of all the alternation of appearances,
indestructibly powerful and joyous." Later Nietzsche developed the theme
that great power consists in the ability to withstand great suffering, to respond
creatively to great challenges, and to transform into advantages what seemed
harmful. Nietzsche was also deeply influenced by Darwin.
It seems Nietzsche, Ger. Philosopher, never read Immanuel Kant
from his own country. By 1804 Kant was dead and gone. Nietzsche was born in
1844. In his book, "Religion within the limits of Reason" wrote
emphatically. Accordingly to Kant, when intellectuality is applied in an
upright and pure form it has difficulties in visualizing or conceptualizing
good and moral activities, because there is no comparison to differentiate good
from bad and moral from immoral. Hence, the comparative face of the good and
moral remains in dark (ignorance). It is not possible to feel or prove the
existence of God by merely innocent curiosity and intelligence. Religion is
merely
based on
logical thinking, yet in the very framework of logic moral values can lead one
on the pathway to God. Kant could not progress further than this. Ancient sages
visualized the supreme personality of God. They experienced and correctly
interpreted the knowledge of God and how to lead there from ignorance. They searched
the "self'' within and that "self'' helped them to recognize the all
pervading "Self'' or "Paramatma", which is a true
"Reality". If a reality lies beyond our mind, we cannot know whether
our ideas "correspond" with it or not~ the essential paint was not
correspondence with a trans-subjective reality, but adequate interpretation of
it, and the same holds good of religious ideas".